Data Platform Engineer - AI Platform

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Data Platform Engineer - AI Platform based in the United States.

This is a hands-on data engineering role focused on building and operating critical infrastructure within a regulated, high-availability government cloud environment. You’ll work on the serving layer that transforms complex datasets into fast, reliable answers for mission-critical investigations. The position combines distributed systems, database performance, data pipeline reliability, production operations, and AI-assisted engineering practices. You’ll take ownership of infrastructure where reliability, compliance, and operational resilience are essential.

The role offers close collaboration with data platform, product, and forward-deployed engineering teams in a distributed environment. You’ll be empowered to make technical decisions close to the systems you operate while solving challenging problems s opportunity is ideal for an engineer who enjoys autonomy, continuous learning, and meaningful work with real-world impact.

• Optimize data-serving infrastructure: Own performance tuning for the Star Rocks-backed serving layer, using query profiling and AI-assisted analysis to identify bottlenecks and resolve slow query patterns before they affect customers.
• Build reliable data pipelines: Develop, maintain, and harden pipelines supporting government cloud investigations, ensuring data infrastructure remains dependable, scalable, and compliant.
• Strengthen operational resilience: Become an independent operator of the serving layer, reducing single points of failure and improving incident response coverage and recovery times.
• Lead production troubleshooting: Investigate infrastructure and data issues using logs, monitoring, AI-assisted debugging, and systematic root-cause analysis, turning complex incidents into sustainable fixes.
• Support compliance and security: Deliver infrastructure changes that satisfy demanding government cloud and regulatory requirements, including backup, retention, audit, and data-management needs.
• Own infrastructure improvements end-to-end: Take responsibility for technical initiatives from investigation and design through implementation, testing, deployment, documentation, and ongoing operation.
• Collaborate across teams: Work closely with Data Platform, Forward Deployed Engineering, Product, and other technical teams to maintain alignment between government cloud capabilities and broader platform requirements.
• Contribute to engineering standards: Participate in sprint planning, asynchronous operational updates, incident retrospectives, documentation, and runbook improvements to continuously strengthen platform reliability.
• Apply AI effectively: Use AI tools to accelerate repeatable workflows, technical research, debugging, code review, documentation, and problem solving while maintaining strong engineering judgment and quality standards.

• U.S. citizenship is required due to government cloud data-access requirements.
• Distributed systems experience: Hands-on experience operating distributed OLAP, analytical database, or serving-layer technologies such as Star Rocks, Trino, Click House, or similar platforms.
• Performance engineering: Proven experience with query tuning, database performance optimization, scalability, and troubleshooting production workloads at scale.
• Data platform reliability: Experience owning data pipelines, production infrastructure, reliability initiatives, and incident response in operationally demanding environments.
• Production ownership: Comfortable taking on-call responsibilities and independently investigating unfamiliar infrastructure with minimal supervision.
• AI fluency: Experience using tools such as Claude, Cursor, or comparable AI assistants to accelerate debugging, code exploration, code review, documentation, and technical research.
• Strong problem solving: Ability to investigate complex technical problems, identify root causes, make sound tradeoffs, and implement durable solutions rather than temporary fixes.
• Autonomous mindset: Comfortab…